Month: December 2009

Insightory.com was soft launched two months after edocr.com through TechCrunch. As TechCrunch put it, they wanted to be the Wikipedia for Management Knowledge. I was drawn to Insightory.com as they offered a document publishing, distribution and interactivity platform, albeit focusing on a niche market. Their plan was to approve every publication before displaying on the site. Not the best approach unless you crowd source the approval process similar to wikipedia. See the email below this post in which Avneet Jolly explains the reasons for the pending shut-down. Instead of arguing about the rights and wrongs of their strategy, I am…

2009 is fast becoming history. The two week period I wanted to use for thinking seem to be evaporating fast. Blogging is a great way to put you mark on the calendar. Twitter is fine, but you do not control it. I can see more and more people coming back to blog in 2010 whilst using twitter as a mechanism to drive traffic. So here are my key objectives for 2010 (business and not personal – bit of a blur there!). 1. Grow my ego whilst learning to be humble – Ok! should have said, personal brand. 2. Grow edocr.com…

Marc adopted similar principles to me in getting the product to market as quickly as possible. As he says in his book, “do it fast, simple, and right the first time”. Based on my discussions with another tech startup from the north, they have rewritten code number of times to get it right. I do not see this as a problem, as you evolve and your goals change, so should the code, unless you can read the future. At edocr.com, we had another consideration, how to build without spending money! We achieved this through using open source products as much…

Having met Marc Benioff on 8th Dec 09 in London and having finished reading his book, “Behind the Cloud” recently, I will be sharing my experience against Marc’s through a series of blog posts. In his book, there are 111 plays. I will be picking plays randomly and would like to invite you to do the same by leaving you experience as comments against my posts. But before I can start, here is a reality check: Marc was well connected, influential, secure and financially stable before he setup salesforce.com. In addition, he lived in the epic centre of technology, San…

As I am in the thinking mode, one thing I am not good at is sticking to one tool for planning instead of using multiple tools. Just to get my head straighten, I thought it would be better to write it down, so here goes. 1. iGTD (1.4.5.6) from fasticon/James Wondrack – great little GTD tool for Mac. It synchronises with iPhone app Todo (1.6.1) through Appigo Sync (0.9.6 Beta) and Mac’s own to do items displayed through iCal and also on iMail. iGTD2, the replacement to iGTD caused problems in the past with synchronising. With my intention of keeping…

edocr.com just like others, need a vast number of external services to function, both as a product and business. From a business perspective, below is a list of web services we rely upon to make our life and our stakeholders lives bit easier: 1. Assembla – edocr.com is my second tech startup. I operated blindly with first tech startup where daily development progress was not visible to me. Today, thanks to Assembla, I am fully aware of the current status of product development. In addition, assembla captures our specifications and knowledge share between the operational team and the development team.…

Since the soft launch of edocr.com in Oct 2007, we have been delivering value to our users and customers. The value delivered right now can be categorised into “exposure” leading to “prospects contacting you”. We are now entering a phase where our customers will have the opportunity to access “leads”, delivering further value. We now need to figure out the best way to commercialise the new value addition, “leads”. The two options available are: 1. Charge per lead 2. Charge a fixed fee I am a great believer of simplicity and keeping all things as simple as possible. Charging a…

I have a problem, both as a buyer and seller on payments using credit cards. I am convinced this problem is not unique to me. As a buyer – mailchimp as an example My HSBC credit card was recently cancelled due to two fraudulent transactions in the US. While I am waiting for a replacement card, my subscription to mailchimp has been halted. This causes a number of difficulties: 1. I cannot use the service to communicate with edocr user and customer base through monthly newsletter. 2. I could use my personal credit card, but this becomes a menace from…

The first ever UK Microsoft Innovation Academy Workshop took place on the 10th Dec 09 at Daresbury Innovation Centre. It was delivered by Jyoti Banerjee. I tweeted the full workshop, a two-day event squeezed into one-day, and my tweets are captured on the following report, which you can read on-line or download. Whilst I had reservations about the value of the workshop prior to participation, I was proven wrong during the afternoon session. As far as I was concerned, it was a day well spent getting a valuable insight into developing the right business model for edocr.com. Few quotes from…